Do The Humanities Create Knowledge? (I)

Which is the Difference between the Sciences and the Humanities?

For about a year now, I have been actively interested in the gap between the two cultures, the scientific and the literary, as presented by C. P. Snow at the Rede conference in May 1959, which finally became a booklet: 'The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution', of the same year, with a second version ('The Two Cultures and its Second Look') in 1963. It provoked controversy, but due to my lack of knowledge, I am not able to assess the criticism that his booklet received. Today the book seems outdated to me.

Much more recently, I was very interested in the ideas put forward by Edward O. Wilson in his extraordinary fin-de-siecle book, 'Consilience' (1998), in which he advocated the unity of knowledge based on the foundations and methodology of the natural sciences. Somewhat later, Stephen Jay Gould, in what was his posthumous work, 'The Hedgehog, the Fox and the Magister's Pox' (2003), discussed Wilson's main theses, very convincingly in my opinion. I should clarify, lest that opinion be misunderstood, that, in general, I am intellectually closer to Wilson than to Gould. Not in this case.

Chris Haufe, in 'Do The Humanities Create Knowledge?' (2023), begins by making the assumption that the difference between the sciences and the so-called humanities is perhaps due to the fact that the former are guided by the "scientific method" to obtain knowledge and the latter are not. The experimental sciences have provided very valuable findings, both regarding the characteristics of nature and the practical applications to which they have led. These findings would have legitimized the scientific method or, in other words, the great success of the experimental disciplines in particular and the natural sciences in general could be attributed to it.

But, as is well known, the “method” is an idealization, a way of representing scientific research that is not faithful to many significant details. Idealizations are valuable precisely because they offer a kind of cognitive understanding that is not hindered by certain details. However, it turns out that humanities studies lack anything equivalent to the "scientific method”. There is no model of how knowledge is produced in the humanities. And that, for the author, is a serious problem.

Since the Enlightenment, the natural sciences would have buttressed their claim to epistemic hegemony by persistent efforts to refine and promulgate their own theory of knowledge – based on the “method” – and produced results that deserve widespread appreciation and that, on many occasions, have solved truly difficult problems. However, in the realm of literary studies, since no alternative model of knowledge has been developed, it is the case that more and more territory – more objects of study – are falling under the aegis of the natural sciences.

According to the author, rather than basing it on that idealization that we scientists call the “method”, any conception of scientific knowledge that does not give due consideration to the centrality of the disciplinary community cannot be considered credible.

Disciplinary knowledge consists of knowledge of the rules governing value judgments in a discipline. It is acquired through exemplification rather than explicit instruction. It is usually tacit. And it can be/has been/is studied through deliberate attempts to violate those norms.

I agree with the author on the importance of knowledge of norms. Indeed, what we understand as the values of science – which is but a collection of ethical and epistemic norms – are not internalized through instruction, but through immersion and tacit assimilation from the practice of teachers and colleagues.

The humanities have systematically explored these unspoken norms, going back long before the Renaissance. Indeed, such explorations helped define humanistic inquiry itself. That is why, following Haufe's argument, the humanities produce disciplinary knowledge, only instead of being about nature, they are about human experience. Their practitioners also share a whole world of norms that are specific to their research focus. The set of these norms is the corpus of disciplinary knowledge.

The early development of the sciences was accompanied by the constitution of communities of practitioners, communities that shared a spirit or recognition among themselves of the value of adopting the methods of inquiry and their norms. This spirit linked them to each other and also to the future professionals, in a way that allowed (and allows) them (us) to reach a better understanding of nature. This mutual recognition formed the basis for what would evolve into increasingly well-defined intellectual communities, of which our modern scientific communities provide instructive examples.

According to the author, the natural sciences produce knowledge, not necessarily because their practitioners do experiments, or because we use very precise instruments, or because we are engaged in investigating 'reality', but because we have developed highly conservative epistemic cultures whose members are very concerned about (interested in) what others in the community think.

Thus, if we use the natural sciences as a model for how real knowledge is generated, the question "do the humanities create knowledge?" depends not so much on the degree to which the humanities employ the scientific method, but on the degree to which they participate in the social processes by which disciplinary knowledge is achieved.

In both the sciences and the humanities, whether a publication (a paper, an article, a book) expresses a deeper understanding of the object of study is a matter for the academic community to decide. An idea becomes knowledge when that idea is adopted – accepted – by the relevant scientific community. In fact, an idea does not even need to be true in any sense to become knowledge. All that is required is that the idea comes to be used by members of the community as part of the more or less undisputed background of research and education in the discipline. In other words, when they adopt it as part of a general community-wide approach to the study of nature.

Because of the essentially social (consensual) nature of scientific knowledge, every idea – even true ones – must go through a process at the community level to determine whether it will fulfill the role played by scientific knowledge.

The great uniformity of the way learning occurs in the natural sciences is a consequence and symptom of the relatively high propensity of natural science disciplines to strive for and achieve consensus on matters of academic interest. When speaking of consensus, it is useful to keep in mind that academic consensus can only manifest itself through a generalized absence of objections to a given proposition, but is compatible with dissent by qualified experts.

The reason why scientific consensus is valuable to scientists is that it facilitates future research, since it lays the groundwork for the community to pursue deeper and more refined research questions. In addition, consensus also makes it possible to address research problems with which there has previously been very limited success, but which become tractable problems through new methods. Without consensus, such a thing would be very unlikely.

As with canonical approaches to scientific research, academic canons, in general, develop and persist on the basis of disciplinary consensus. Each profession constructed a canon, the mastery of which was both the price of admission to practice and the basis for participation in debate.

Scientific knowledge is to science what canonical texts are to the humanities. The scholarly values exemplified by canonical texts in the humanities are (or become) the criteria by which the quality of scholarly production is judged. Any member of a discipline seeking to produce high quality work will use his or her understanding of these values to shape the form and content of his or her scholarship. Indeed, probably the most important knowledge acquired through repeated exposure to canonical texts is the aptitude to generate work of scholarly significance.

At this point, therefore, we can answer the question of the book's title by affirming that the humanities can produce knowledge, provided they achieve a scholarly consensus. But also implicit is the idea that it could be the case that knowledge cannot be created without an academic consensus on which to base it. To the extent that contemporary humanistic disciplines lack such consensus, they will not produce knowledge.

Another feature to take into account when assessing the possibilities of humanities disciplines to create knowledge is salience, that property of being notable, of standing out against a background of minor characteristics.

Academic training is largely about developing the ability to be sensitive to the salience of certain properties. Salience is the crude oil that fuels rational inquiry. But it is equally the barrier that discriminates in favor of some lines of inquiry and against others. One's sense of salience is one's sense of what matters. When that sense aligns with disciplinary norms, it becomes knowledge: knowledge of what matters. Therefore, an academic community with the potential to generate knowledge must engage in a shared sense of salience, because it is only through the exercise of this shared sense that community members can develop the kind of agreement that disciplinary knowledge consists of.

It is precisely the shared knowledge of what matters, embodied in a cultivated sense of the salience of certain characteristics, that separates experts from others. This is how experts can communicate effectively with each other about matters that fall within their purview.

Background and salience are inextricably linked. Without most features taking a back seat, neither the scientist, nor the critic, nor the literary historian has any ability to distinguish the salience of some features from the lack of salience of others. In fact, it is the possession of the ability to see important features as salient in a context that may be largely ignored that defines someone as an expert.

As in the natural sciences, the norms governing what matters in a discipline emerge when – and only when – humanists possess a shared sense of salience, when each individual's ability to foreground certain features as particularly worthy of explanation functions in roughly the same way.

Title: Do The Humanities Create Knowledge?

Author: Chris Haufe

Ed. by Cambridge University Press, 2023.